


At First It's Hard

by K_promises_fall



Category: RWBY
Genre: Gen, I guess its a character study?, Mentioned Ruby Rose (RWBY), a very shallow one, slight AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-18
Updated: 2017-07-18
Packaged: 2018-12-03 15:59:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 912
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11535576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/K_promises_fall/pseuds/K_promises_fall
Summary: It's hard and no one understands. OR. It's hard and everyone else makes it worse. OR. In which growing up is hard until it's suddenly not that bad. OR. Weiss eventually learns that things would be easier if she just stopped bottling up her feelings all the time.





	At First It's Hard

At first it’s hard.

Weiss grows up a Schnee. People - people like Blake - tend to think that means growing up rich and powerful, self-centred and narrow-sighted, naive at best, and at worst, as close to a slave owner as one could be in this day and age.

At first, Weiss thinks they are wrong. Being a Schnee is exceptionally difficult. Being a Schnee comes with demands, preconceptions and an almost prejudicial level of monitoring. 

The world demands perfection when it sees and hears the Schnee name, and perfection isn’t easy. It requires practice, a lot of it, and so most of Weiss’ memories of her childhood are of drills. Competency wasn’t enough. Talent wasn’t enough. And complaint wasn’t an option.

The world had already made up its mind about how it viewed her. Whether it was the image of her as the young primadonna of the family - the talented singer between her sister’s military strictness and her brother’s supposed business acumen, or as just another face in the supposed Schnee hivemind where profit mattered and empathy did not, or as door that need only be nudged aside to gain admittance to her father.

The world was always watching. Privacy is something Weiss treasures, because she hardly ever seemed to have it. The public gaze is a tiring thing to be exposed to. Her father’s gaze was worse. Her brother’s, a needling thing lazily attempting to pass as brotherly affection. She is hardly ever truly alone. Almost never free to release the tension in her shoulders that comes from walking with her head high at all times.

It’s hard. And Beacon was supposed to change that.

So yes, at first it’s hard.

She’s introduced to the girl who would be her partner for the next four years and Weiss explodes. Not because Ruby is a year younger or is a headache inducing level of reckless or got chosen over her to be leader of their team (although yes, that one prodded her pride like a hot rebar).

Ruby pulls her away from Blake and Yang and says the words “mind reader” and “empath” and years of pent up anger and frustration push Weiss into a tirade that’s embarrassing to remember now.

It’s hard, at first.

She doesn’t spill Ruby’s secret, because Ruby has yet to share hers, but that doesn’t make it any easier. It’s obvious how the other girl dances around Weiss’ moods, avoiding the worst of her tempers and finding the best times to approach her with new ideas and strategies and invitations to have fun and forget about schoolwork for a time.

Weiss is like a volcano, there are years of stress and anger and misery pent up inside her, and Ruby keeps cutting off every vent that opens up for Weiss to spew lava from. At first it gets worse. Ruby clearly doesn’t realise what she is doing and Weiss is too stubborn and angry and evasive to let her know. So Weiss stews and boils until she finally explodes, hurting herself and everyone in the blast radius. Ruby’s eyes are wide and sad and horrified, but Weiss can barely see through her rage filled tears and the pain in her chest, and after it’s all said and done Weiss goes back to Atlas.

Just for a while, being back home is easy. 

Weiss falls back into old habits, and everything is comfortingly familiar. She knows how to act and what to do and no one can see beyond that to the privacy of her thoughts and feelings. In her own mind, Weiss is free, and that freedom is all she needs.

At first.

And then it’s not.

Yang breaks some poor guy’s leg on international television and Pyrrha pulls apart a girl who is actually a robot and then all Weiss can see on any new station is Beacon’s fall to a grim invasion. An academy full of hunters and huntresses unable to stop it.

She doesn’t know if Blake or Yang or Ruby are alive. Doesn’t know if Ren or Nora or Pyrrha or even Jaune made it out okay. Doesn’t know who’s alive or dead or missing because all Winter will tell her when she asks is that it’s classified, and her father gives her this look whenever she’s even thinking about it - about them. A look that says, “Forget them and move forward.” A look that says, “Why are you wasting time with this again.” 

And once again Weiss is a volcano, but she’s the only thing keeping herself from erupting. Echoes of thought plead that she stay calm, offering reassurances that they must all be fine, that they have to be. Those pleas turn into a solitary voice of restrained anger that says “not yet”.

She erupts in phases. She disobeys. She argues. She stands her ground. And when all is said and done, and the anger is a simmering pool of regret and exhaustion, she leaves.

Now it’s - it’s not easy, but it’s not hard either. Ruby doesn’t try to play around her moods. She apologised for that. Weiss had apologised too, for being difficult, for always being difficult.

When frustration builds up in her and she starts to steam, Ruby asks if she wants to talk about it, and sometimes, Weiss says yes. Sometimes she’s not really ready yet, but she will be. They talk, is the important thing. Weiss talks. It’s good.

At first, it was hard, but it got easier.

**Author's Note:**

> I will probably read this over tomorrow and hate it, so here, have it before it never again sees the light of day.


End file.
